A black man named Barack Hussein Obama is President of the United States. Gay marriage is legal in all fifty states. Pot is legal in twenty-four. Donald Trump is the presidential nominee for a major political party. The Cubbies and the Indians are in the World Series. The Cleveland Cavaliers won the NBA title this year. Early this year an armed group took over the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge. Later this year they were arrested for it, stood trial, and walked.

I think the switch happened back when Obama was first elected but it might have been as far back as Reagan.

Well, I'm interested in the product. I imagine others are as well who want to keep a gun at home outside a gun safe but still unusable by an untrained person who might find it. Could be children, could be a colleague rummaging through your desk (with permission), could be the woman who comes every two weeks to clean your house.

There isn't any situation where I'm going to snatch up a gun and want to fire it instantly. I'm simply too afraid of killing the wrong person to do something like that. I'm not a soldier, I'm not a policeman. A fingerprint reader will have plenty of time to reliably match my print because I'm going to take some time before deciding to kill somebody. If I can't take that time, then I guess they are going to kill me.

He's a snake oil salesman. He's been saying Trump will win for over a year because Trump is a "master persuader" and could sell water to a drowning man. Facts have no bearing on people's choices, only "linguistic kill shots" matter, etc. Now that Trump is losing badly and Adams is being proved wrong, it turns out that neither he nor Trump is "fueled by criticism" after all, they just duck it like everyone else.

Yes. The reboot has been a great big sack of nothing in terms of social issues. Putting a gay character onscreen a year after gay marriage has been legalized all over the U.S. is hardly daring filmmaking.

Really, it's "we can pay for it now, or someone else can pay for it later." That's why most of "we" is satisfied to keep doing what we are doing. Speed up the warming processes and maybe interest will perk up. And indeed peat bogs burning, along with breakdown of methane clathrates in melted permafrost might just provide that burst of speed. Of course "we" would have to be convinced of the dangers posed by these events and "we" are to a surprising extent willingfully ignorant and stubborn.

But second, they claim they've been doing this to images uploaded to Dropbox. [...] But what happens when they find out their new algorithm -- which compresses AND decompresses! -- has a bug when it hits a certain data condition, and sorry, all your images are corrupted because the EXIF data common to them all triggered the bug.

Assume that the engineers behind this aren't morons. Failing that, read the article. For every newly compressed image, Dropbox does a decompression and a bit-for-bit comparison with the original before replacing the original. If there's an image that triggers a bug that corrupts the image for whatever reason, their test will catch it before the original image is replaced.

Maybe there's a panic button in there for you to hammer on if the car is heading for a cliff, but there's certainly no steering wheel. One stated reason why Google changed the project scope is that it is unreasonable to expect a human operator to remain attentive when they aren't really driving the car.

Well, there's the possibility of sudden catastrophic failure of the hardware, for which there may be no spare parts anymore. I hope someone is exploring the virtualization angle; any fifty year-old piece of hardware could be emulated in software running on $200 phone today. So migrating off the creaky hardware need not involve disinterring all that assembly language and exposing it to "agile" development.

Back in the 90's, for non-standards compliance alone I would have enjoyed seeing a random manager from Microsoft hung by their wrists and flogged. Daily.
But bullets and bombs I'd reserve for the terrorists themselves, the bastards.

The Olympics is a large surge of incoming people, but consider that Rio receives 2.82 million international tourist visitors per year (source: Wikipedia). I'd imagine the tourism numbers have come down since the heartbreaking pictures of those microencephalic babies appeared, but even a 50% decrease leaves a mess of people who could carry the virus home with them.

Whatever is going to happen with Zika is going to happen with or without the Olympics. And with global warming proceeding apace, the mosquitos are going to be spreading out of the tropical regions in any event. Get ready.